Rochester has often been accused of ignoring, or at least insufficiently addressing, the root causes of violent crime in the community.

And if the governor has his way, says City Council member Elaine Spaull, that unfortunate tradition will continue.

Governor David Paterson has proposed reducing youth bureau funding by 24.5 percent this year to help close a state budget gap. But Paterson also wants to change the way youth services are funded by lumping mandated and nonmandated services together, Spaull says, and funding them through block grants.

The fear, she says, is that without an independent funding source, nonmandated services like recreation programs and emergency shelters will suffer.

"If you aggregate those, and you continue to see an increase in juvenile detention and law enforcement-like initiatives for young people, we're going to pay for that," Spaull says. "And so, all the prevention work, the homeless shelters, will lose out."

Spaull is also executive director of the Center for Youth on Monroe Avenue, which provides counseling, street outreach, transitional living, and other services for youth ages 12 to 21.

Agencies may be able to steel themselves against budget cuts, Spaull says, as long as they're not too deep. But by lumping the funding together, all the reductions could come from one side of the equation.

"There is no ceiling on what the nonmandated cut can be," she says. "It could be 75 percent. That's the fear."

One of the people fighting against the funding formula change is Dwayne Mahoney, director of the Boys & Girls Club of Rochester.

Mahoney recently went to Albany to lobby legislators against the change.

Balling the money into a block grant would harm the continuity of youth programs, Mahoney says, because you wouldn't know from year to year which programs are going to be funded.

Under the current system, funding is set aside for specific programs, Mahoney says. But with block grants, many programs are covered by one pool of money.

"Unfortunately, you just never know how it will work out," Mahoney says. "In the interim, how do the kids get served? How do you keep the people that are actually implementing the program?"

Spaull says that she understands that the state has a budget crisis to cure, but that this legislation has potential for long-term damage.

"I don't think I'm being overly dramatic," she says. "It could cause more problems, more juvenile crime, more inattentiveness to the root causes."